Tradeskills grade: D
Above: My paladin there is not an enchanter. But thanks to her garrison’s Enchanting Study building, she can do all but the highest-level enchants without the skill, using an NPC.
For every terrific thing introduced in the tradeskill-related garrison buildings, it seems tradeskills themselves were gutted an equal amount.
In previous expansions, Warcraft trade skills awarded bonuses or special items to the characters who held them. Blacksmiths might make the very best armor only for themselves, or have the ability to put sockets on their own gear that could hold gems with extra stats on them. Enchanters could enchant their rings to add extra stats, something that players with other skills couldn’t do. And so on.
But other than selling items for gold — or saving the gold you might spend on other people’s crafted items — players will find little reason to hold a trade skill.
Each crafting type was given an item in Warlords that could only be made once a day, supplemented by an additional number made in the player’s garrison building. Alchemists, for example, can make an alchemical catalyst once a day, with a yield of up to ten items at a time. The alchemy hut in the garrison can make an additional amount, depending on the player’s skill and whether a follower is assigned to work there.
Above: At the Forge building, my paladin surveys the recipes she can buy. All items they make can be resold.
A couple dozen very-limited high end items in each profession use these cooldowns. They are the only things restricted to trade skill holders to make, and they can almost all be sold to others.
This is the first expansion where every crafted item is available to everyone at the beginning, with no additional items opening up due to skill. Raising your skill level only awards you additional daily-cooldown items when you craft them.
Almost all of the day-to-day recipes are available to those that hold the garrison buildings for a profession, regardless of whether they have the trade skill or not. So you can visit someone else’s garrison and buy or craft all but the most-valuable items in game.
Those most-valuable items are sellable, so you’ll find them by the dozens in the auction house. Don’t like the character-boosting statistics on the items you buy? The item to reroll those stats is also for sale. Most are outclassed by sellable raid dungeon drops.
A few vestiges of the old crafting system remain. A few fun items still require Engineering to wear, though less-powerful versions are available to everyone. Statistics-boosting flask buffs still lasts twice as long for alchemists as they do for anyone else, but it’s a minor bonus and certainly not enough to make up for the fact that they can’t craft raid-dungeon-level items like the other professions.
Above: My reagent bank, full of unused materials.
It all creates little incentive to raise or practice tradeskills, and that’s a shame, considering how robust the system had become. My characters are sitting on more mining ore and herbs than they know what to do with, waiting on the daily cool downs to be able to craft something new. A recent change to alchemy potions (to require just herbs instead of meat or fish) has my fisherman sitting idle.
I used to adore tradeskills. Now, those slightly obsessive tendencies are focused on garrison missions instead.
General raids grade: C+. Higher-level raids grade: A-
Above: Imperator Mar’gok, the final boss in the Highmaul raid dungeon, after a truly bad day.
The Highmaul large-group raid dungeon opened December 2, and the best guilds of players in the world have cleared it on the toughest difficulty already. The rest of us are still slogging through, at a pace that feels quick, but still right in line to be ready for the next big dungeon (Blackrock Foundry) when it opens in February.
The bosses inside are fun, and some of the tactics they use are both entertaining and challenging at the right difficulty level. It’s a fun dungeon, with just enough little enemies between each of the bosses to keep the short travel time interesting. You can learn more about each Highmaul boss in our dungeon preview, but overall, players are responding well to the design.
As of this week, all bosses are now available on the game’s easiest “looking for raid” (LFR) difficulty, which matches random players together to complete the dungeon.
Normal and heroic difficulty now allow people to compose pre made, flexibly sized groups of 10-30 to tackle harder versions of the bosses. And the toughest Mythic difficulty, which the guild Paragon cleared last week, is still the realm of the hardcore few and their 20-man groups.
“Having flexibility has really changed the face of raiding,” end-game player Deborah Broome said on Facebook. “Now we take people on Sunday that couldn’t make it on Saturday, so someone that only raids one day has just as much of a chance to get loot. We never had this with 10-man or 25-man [raids] — you were there the whole weekend or you weren’t. It has changed the way we handle loot. It is worth it, because we get to play with people that we normally wouldn’t get to.”
Above: My druid prepares to heal in the LFR-difficulty Kargath Bladefist fight. My group ignores nearly all the mechanics, no one dies, and we down him in seconds.
I’ve done the LFR wings, cleared Highmaul on Normal and Heroic difficulties, and killed the first boss on Mythic difficulty on two level 100 characters. The differences between the difficulty levels of each tier are striking.
Highmaul has a few basic gear checks, but the difficult parts of the dungeon are the tactics the bosses use, which require quick responses from players and good overall coordination from groups to complete.
Because those are precisely the things that tend to suffer on LFR difficulty, tuning those things down has made the raid dungeon extremely easy at that difficulty level. Virtually every boss is killed by players grouping up and tossing as much damage as they can without regard for the raid’s mechanics — a strategy called “zerging it down” after the waves of little Zerg aliens in Starcraft.
“LFR is way too easy,” said Slogger, who plays a level 100 Horde shaman. “Some of the [Highmaul] fights are pretty fun, but I haven’t seen enough of them to say for sure.”
Above: Kargath utters his final line before collapsing.
The result is a dungeon that has zero challenge for the large chunk of Warcraft’s players who do not belong to more-hardcore guilds. If you do belong to a coordinated group, there is a good difficulty shift between Normal to Heroic and Heroic to Mythic to keep guilds at different skill levels and time commitments entertained.
Mythic fights, in particular, add fun mechanics for players to work with. The first fight against Kargath Bladefist, for example, adds the “Roar of the Crowd” buff: Your group does more damage the more it shows its prowess in the ring.
World bosses grade: C
Above: Drov the Ruiner prepares for his inevitable demise.
Level-100 players can group up to kill large bosses that spawn in the countryside. Two are available now: Drov the Ruiner, a giant cyclops-like gronn who lives in a cave, and Tarlna the Ageless, a centaur-like genesaur who lives in a swamp. Both present some challenge to disorganized random groups (which is typically what you’ll find to kill them), but both typically die reasonably quickly, especially because players can run back during the fight from nearby graveyards if they die. A player has a chance of receiving loot from the first one they kill each week.
The items Drov and Tarlna can drop for each character class typically consist of one good option and two that are lackluster. For most players, the world bosses are just a weekly slot machine pull for an unexciting epic item. That said, this is the role that world bosses have played for two expansion packs now.